• Elon Musk’s Twitter deal has received $700 million in backing from little-known Vy Capital, Bloomberg reported.
• The Dubai-based firm was founded by Alexander Tamas, who has previously backed Musk’s SpaceX, Boring, and Neuralink.
• Tamas’ Twitter account liked an April 21 Musk tweet that called for Twitter to “authenticate all real humans.”
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Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover bid has high-profile backing from big names like Sequoia Capital and Larry Ellison. But another backer is a little-known, Dubai-based investment firm, according to a Bloomberg report. 

Vy Capital — which has a sparse website and no contact information — has more than $5 billion in assets and committed $700 million to the Twitter bid, making it the third-biggest outside equity investor in the deal.

Little is also known about Vy’s founder Alexander Tamas, who once worked with Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner and has been described by top venture capitalists Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen as “Milner’s human supercomputer,” Bloomberg said. He also once worked at Goldman Sachs and was a founding member of Arma Partners. 

Tamas previously invested in Musk’s other companies, SpaceX, Boring and Neuralink. And some of Vy Capital’s public assets have included holdings in Shopify and Activision Blizzard, Bloomberg reports, though those positions closed by 2018, regulatory filings reveal.

More recently, his Twitter account liked an April 21 tweet from Musk that said Twitter should “authenticate all real humans” and kicked off the recent bot dispute that has snagged the takeover bid.

Meanwhile, in a 2019 interview, he echoed Musk’s sentiments on free speech: “What I think is misguided is the idea that our social media platforms should govern what we can and cannot see.” He noted that allowing private companies to become arbiters of free speech would be “dangerous.”

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